


Candor—my tepid friend

by middlemarch



Category: Foyle's War
Genre: Babies, Conversations, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Memories, Parenthood, Telling the truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 06:59:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11504145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She'd come to call at a suitable time, determined to be a suitable visitor. She'd plenty of experience with that from the vicarage, but then they were alone.





	Candor—my tepid friend

“She looks just like her mother, has Edie’s eyes,” Paul said fondly, gazing across at Sam who held his daughter in her arms. Edith was in the kitchen, bustling about making tea and sandwiches, having graciously accepted the pot of home-made greengage preserves Sam had brought from her own somewhat paltry larder to give as a gift and then taken herself off, leaving Sam alone with Paul and the baby, who’d then been tucked in her wicker basket at her father’s side. Once upon a time, that basket would have been beribboned, festooned with lace, the baby herself in an elaborately hand-smocked dress, but with the War, everything was simplified. Little Clementine, a terrible mouthful as far as Sam was concerned, even if she was named after the Prime Minister’s wife, was snug enough in her second-hand swaddle and the slightly yellowed cap on her head was embroidered with fine white drawn work and French knots. _Quality lasts_ Sam heard her mother saying again, though it had been used to justify a sturdy but dull pair of boots or the corded navy blue silk with the seemingly infinite hem to be let down, and she wondered if it had been Edith who wore the cap last or Paul.

Sam looked at the baby in her arms, carefully placed there by Paul in short order, and wondered at what he had said; it was the most patently false statement she’d ever heard Paul utter, as the baby was his very image, all serious dark gaze under level brows and high cheekbones, albeit Clementine was drawn with a finer brush than her father, her brows feathery, her chin elfin. It was a mystery what exactly Edith Milner had contributed to her daughter, one Sam supposed time would be sure to tell, if there was no other way to solve it. Sam adjusted the hand she had splayed against the baby’s back and watched the baby blink up at her, just as her father had on so many occasions when Sam made a rash declaration or perhaps had let her foot rest on the gas pedal just a bit more heavily than her passengers would have preferred. She felt the words crowding her mouth, ready to spill out in a challenge to Paul’s assertion, she felt the warmth in her cheeks at the prospect of teasing him a little as she never could Mr. Foyle. Paul was not as removed from her own homely sphere, a hero to her mortal, where Mr. Foyle hovered above them both at the pantheon’s apex, sure to be assessing Zeus and Ares with a discerning eye, inured to Hermes’s mischief or Aphrodite’s rapturous glamour. She considered how Paul was not like their superior officer and what Mr. Foyle might think of her impulse, how he had once remarked, _I wouldn’t say that_ , when she had needed to hear it. She thought of how he always knew what to say and how Paul knew how to be silent, Mr. Foyle at her bedside when she woke from the anthrax delirium, looking as tired as she felt, and Paul’s small, sturdy bouquet of asters and Michaelmas daisies and his voice reading to her from the police blotter during the hours of her convalescence, the sure steadiness of his consolation, the timbre of his voice the only commentary on Brookie’s over-exuberant transcriptions. Sam knew she wouldn’t be asked to be small Clementine’s godmother, Edith had sisters enough for that, and there’d always been a certain uneasy frisson between them since Jane Milner’s murder and Edith’s doubt, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do what a godmother might do and what a friend ought.

“Oh, but she does, doesn’t she? She’s a beauty, Paul, a bonnie wee lass my Uncle Malcolm would say,” Sam replied. It was half a lie, half a truth, poured in with equal hands as the waiter at that fancy seaside hotel had prepared the café au lait the Frenchman they were questioning had insisted Mr. Foyle take instead of a black coffee or weak Indian tea. The words tasted better than that cup had, though Paul’s proud smile reminded her of Mr. Foyle’s gaze when she’d wrinkled her nose at finishing it; in the confiding shadow of the Wolesley, he’d said “Had better than that on leave from the front in ‘17” and she had positively glowed, unable even to be embarrassed by it, to be told something of his past, as she was sure she did now, to share something of Paul’s future.

**Author's Note:**

> There is a nice set of screenshots on Tumblr from All Clear with the scene where Sam confronts Foyle about not needing her to be a driver and he says "I wouldn't say that," which is what inspired this story. I feel like the Sam & Paul friendship gets short shrift and that what I like best about Foyle's War, despite writing plenty of shippy stories, is friendship and not the romance. I added a little to what I thought might have transpired when Sam was ill and I have let Sam express my own disapproval of Edith Ashford Milner who even for a moment believed Paul killed Jane. The encounter with the Frenchman was my own invention, from a case I imagined we never heard about, but which involved someone ostensibly from the French Resistance (or maybe not) seeking British aid and creating all sorts of difficulties for Foyle. Sam, at least, would have enjoyed the trip to the hotel.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
